[PcTech] Outlook Contacts problem

["Bob Cagle" <bcagle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Group:

 

Let me say first of all that I am not a network expert - I'm an AS/400
guy, but I do know more about MS Office than the average power user.

 

I am having a problem with the Contacts in Outlook - it's a little
difficult to explain, but I'll do my best.  First off, an explanation of
what has happened:

 

On Labor Day weekend, our Exchange server crashed.  We were unable to
recover the machine, even though we had backups of the system state. For
some reason our backup software did not want to restore the system state
because it could no longer find the machine (imagine that!).  Anyway, we
were able to recover a copy of the Information Store and setup Exchange
on a new server.  Unfortunately, the network support consultants I had
in here doing this work for me setup a whole new domain for the network
on the new server; therefore we had to rejoin each PC to the new domain.
Fortunately, we run W2K Pro and XP Pro on the desktops and we were able
to retrieve their desktop settings and favorites from their previous
network user profile.

 

Now to the problem at hand:  we were unable to merge the old Information
Store into the new instance of Exchange.  One of the network consultants
found a package on the web that could retrieve individual .PST file from
the Information store (the .IDB (?) file).  We then went to each desktop
and imported that .PST into the users' copies of Outlook.  Voila, we
have most of our e-mail and contacts back.  BUT, now when a user creates
a new message, and clicks on the 'To' or 'Cc' buttons and browses to
their personal contacts - the entries are not listed.  That's a problem.

 

I have tried everything I can think of but I have found only one thing
that will cause the entry to re-appear on this list and that is to edit
each contact, and delete and re-enter their e-mail addresses.  When that
change is made and the contact is re-saved, they are once again visible
in the contacts list.

 

Some of my users have hundreds of contacts, so the solution I have found
really isn't much of one.  Does anyone know of any way to reset these
entries to make them visible again?

 

Sorry for the length of the post and I hope it's clear enough - if not,
let me know, and I will try to explain it better.

 

Thanks,

 

Bob Cagle

IT Manager

Lynk, Inc.

913-492-9202 x41